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Asian Latin Americans

Latin Americans of Asian descent

  • 16 min read
  • 6 chapters

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There has been notable emigration from these communities in recent decades, so that there are now hundreds of thousands of people of Asian Latin American origin in both Japan and the United States.

History

The first Asian Latin Americans were Filipinos who made their way to Latin America (primarily to Cuba and Mexico and secondarily to Argentina, Colombia, Panama and Peru) in the 16th century, as slaves, crew members, and prisoners during the Spanish colonial rule of the Philippines through the Viceroyalty of New Spain, with its capital in Mexico City. For two and a half centuries (between 1565 and 1815) many Filipinos and Chinese sailed on the Manila-Acapulco Galleons, assisting in the Spanish Empire's monopoly in trade. Some of these sailors never returned to the Philippines and many of their descendants can be found in small communities around Baja California, Sonora, Mexico City, Peru and others, thus making Filipinos the oldest Asian ethnic group in Latin America.

While South Asians had been present in various forms in Latin America for centuries by the 1800s, it was in this century that the flow into the region spiked dramatically. This rapid influx of hundreds of thousands of mainly male South Asians was due to the need for indentured servants. This is largely tied to the abolition of black slavery in the Caribbean colonies in 1834. Without the promise of free labor and a hostile working class on their hands, the Dutch colonial authorities had to find a solution – cheap Asian labor.

Many of these immigrant populations became such fixtures in their adopted countries that they acquired names of their own. For example, the Chinese men who labored in agricultural work became known as "coolies". While these imported Asian laborers were initially just replacement for agricultural slave labor, they gradually began to enter other sectors as the economy evolved. Before long, they had entered more urban work and the service sector. In certain areas, these populations assimilated into the minority populations, adding yet another definition to go on a casta.

In some areas, these new populations caused conflict. In Northern Mexico, tensions became inevitable when the United States began to shut off Chinese immigration in the early 1880s. Many who were originally bound for the United States were re-routed to Mexico. The rapid increase in population and rise to middle/upper class standing generated strong resentment among existing residents. These tensions lead to riots. In the state of Sonora, the entire Chinese population was expelled in 1929.

Today, the overwhelming majority of Asian Latin Americans are either of East Asian (namely Chinese, Japanese or Korean), or West Asian descent (mostly Lebanese or Syrians), many of whom arrived during the second half of the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s. Japanese migration mostly came to a halt after World War II (with the exception of Japanese settlement in the Dominican Republic), while Korean migration mostly came to an end by the 1980s. Chinese migration remains ongoing in a number of countries.

Settlement of war refugees has been extremely minor: a few dozen ex-North Korean soldiers settled in Argentina after the Korean War and some Hmong settled in French Guiana after the Vietnam War.

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